Unwelcome Dental Advice

Dear diary,

Seriously, who starts their diary entries with “dear diary?” I must be losing it. So much has happened in the last few years, and I’m starting to think there aren’t many of us left. I get this gnawing sensation in the back of my head to write something down for anyone who comes upon this ravaged planet after we’re all long gone, and my desire to tell these future visitors that we addressed our diary as though it were a person is strong. Whatever.

This will be my last entry. Janice died two days ago, even though I gave her the last of our food. Dehydration. The water is all guarded. The only water we can live off of is anything we find still in a convenience store or hidden in someone’s cabinets if they hadn’t been raided yet. So now I’m all alone and out of food and water. I will die in a day or two, but I’ll be too weak to pen another page after this.

How did we get here? It’s 2024, you’d think our military might have stood a chance, but no. They were wildly ineffectual. It really is like the movies, where a foreign force surprises us and attacks from within, only to leave our incredibly overpaid defense budget of a military looking like it was run by five year olds. What good are tanks and aircraft when our enemy can just disable them with a gnash of their teeth? A flash of the claws and our machine gun toting military forces fail.

It’s hard to say when it started. I remember hearing on the news in ‘84, when I was just eight, about a town Pennsylvania where these things first emerged. I can’t remember the exact name, something with Falls at the end. Their little reign of terror only lasted a night – Christmas Eve of all nights – but the entire town was affected. The theater burned down, several people were killed, and many more were severely injured. It was a fucking mess, and it was all the news could talk about for like two weeks and then POOF, nothing more.

And then a few years later, I think 1990, they appeared in Manhattan. Some media corporation with ties to a science department had gotten their hands on one and were conducting experiments. Naturally, all hell broke loose and the building – all 49 stories – was completely overrun. Somehow people didn’t remember the incident in Pennsylvania, so they had no idea how to deal with the beasts. There were some strange television airings during that outbreak, and people got to see firsthand the destruction these creatures could bring.

And yet the signs were ignored.

Once that little uprising was quelled, people again forgot about it, and decades went by without an issue. And then two years ago something went down in Chicago. Some guy – I heard is was the same kid from Pennsylvania and New York – died and his little pet project, the spawn off all these monstrosities, passed down to his son. I guess he – I think the guy’s name was Billy or Willy or some shit – never told his son how to keep the creature from spawning more of its kind, because weeks later, Chicago was overrun with the things.

This time, it got worse. The National Guard was called in and were taken completely by surprise. The things chewed through the controls on tanks and caused them to fire upon one another. There were hundreds of casualties within hours. After only two days, Chicago was quarantined, cut off from the rest of the state, and there were talks of nuking it. That order never came. The creatures had escaped the quarantine zone and spread to Milwaukee, Minneapolis, and other major cities. Soon they were on airplanes, bringing them down all over the country.

Those that didn’t bring down the airplanes flew across the world to other countries, spreading their kind to all corners of the world. It was a fucking mess. I remembered watching the news and seeing a Japanese battleship off the coast of Shimoda sinking in the oceans, and the little green monstrosities laughing and attacking the crew as they tried to abandon ship. Then there was a last-ditch plan to set up massive UV lights all over cities, but they beasts killed our power grid and blew up several nuclear reactors. While they certainly don’t appear intelligent when you encounter them, there’s something of a spark of brilliance to their actions that can’t be denied.

That intellect was prevalent when the monsters launched several rockets that covered the sky in a permanent blanket of smoke and clouds. Now the world is forever dark, never letting an inkling of sun through the consistent cloud cover. Anyone born after last year – if they somehow manage to survive – will never know the warmth of a sunrise, or the majesty of a sunset over the mountains. Instead, they’ll only know suffering and darkness.

I don’t think we can go on much longer like this. I don’t even know how many people are still alive. I feel like I’m in a Terminator movie, but with little green beasts instead of manhunting robots. It could have all been avoided if that guy’s son had just followed three little rules: Never expose them to bright light, never get them wet, and never feed them after midnight.

This is Brian Grayson, signing off for the last time.